


Post-Storm

by wisekrakens



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 04:15:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisekrakens/pseuds/wisekrakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they come back inside, about an hour later, Chuck helpfully ignores them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Post-Storm

**Author's Note:**

> You all don't care about how this came to be, but it involves a rewatch, the hour after midnight, and the mad enabling skills of popkin16.
> 
> I'm still a little iffy on my portrayal of psychological dependency, having had no experience with the thing myself, so I apologize for the things I've no doubt gotten wrong.

After the traffic in the gate room dies down, John finds Rodney standing out alone on a balcony, head down, fingers twisting into each other. The bandage on his arm is blindingly white against his coat, and John is careful to give it space as he settles against the railing. They’re both too tired to hide behind words; the only sound that finds them is that of the ocean crashing against Atlantis’s walls.

When they come back inside, about an hour later, Chuck helpfully ignores them.

  


John has always found first aid soothing. It’s a perverse thing, he knows, to find pleasure in something that derives itself from pain; but it gives him some kind of control, some kind of say in healing a wound he hadn’t prevented. It makes him feel a little bit less like he’s sliding backwards.

Rodney finds first aid soothing, too, but for different reasons. It’s one of the few times another person can care enough to look after him; the touch, chaste as it undoubtedly is, does more to heal his wounds than the bandage.

When John pulls out the first aid kit he keeps in his quarters, Rodney holds out his arm. He talks and swears and squeals at the antiseptic, and the stitches, and the dressing, because it’s expected and because John would worry if he didn’t. But he doesn’t pull away.

  


Rodney goes to Carson the day after the storm. Carson pronounces John’s work sound, muses about getting John to teach a first aid class or else stealing him for infirmary work on emergency days, and sends Rodney off with a bottle of light painkillers.

He doesn’t use them until he wakes up, sweating, muscles cramping, arm on fire, ghost knives gliding through the skin all over his body. In the confusion, he takes one too many.

  


John stops Rodney outside his lab a week after the storm, because he’s been noticing Rodney’s reaction time is slowing down and he wants to be sure Rodney’s okay before he puts the team back on the mission roster.

It’s a painful conversation, for both of them, for half a dozen different reasons. But Rodney assures John that he’s fine, and their next mission – overnight, to an uninhabited planet – is scheduled for two days later.

  


John catches Rodney fumbling for his pill bottle in their tent at two in the morning.

  


John takes Rodney’s pill bottle for the rest of the mission.

  


But John doesn’t report Rodney, even though he knows he should. He talks to him instead, tells him he did more to save the city than John could ever have, tells him that he handled Kolya wonderfully, tells him that there’s no one he’d trust more to pull his ass out of the fire. Tells him that he can’t trust Rodney with his pill bottle. Asks him to stop.

It’s another painful conversation, full of stops and starts and reddening ears, but Rodney agrees, and with that rock to stand on he flexes that incredible willpower and by the time his stitches come out, Rodney still misses his pill bottle, but it’s a shriveled, detached sort of missing.

John adds it to his Care-Of list, right after allergies and right before alien alcohol, and John makes sure he or Teyla or Ford or Carson or Radek is around every time Rodney is recovering from an injury. He makes sure he’s around when Rodney’s not recovering from an injury, because Jesus, if he’d only known he wanted a friend.


End file.
